Sanae Nakahara

She graduated from the Kunimoto Girls' High School.[2] Her mother was a stage actress and raised her after divorcing her father.

She first starred in the film Mura Hachibu while still in high school, a film about the Shizuoka Prefecture Ueno village ostracism incident.[3] Two years later she signed an exclusive contract with Japanese movie studio Nikkatsu,[3] appearing in films such as Season of the Sun. She appeared in around 80 works over the next 8 years before becoming independent and acting for other studios.

Her most recent work had mainly been appearances on stage.[4]

Nakahara married Kinji Fukasaku, who at the time was a young director at Toei. They had no meetings and he gave her no acting guidance, but after the film he took, as she described, a furious approach with letters and phone calls. They decided to get married after being together only 3 months.[5] Whenever he directed his own starring actresses, the media was taken with stories of the crisis of their marriage. She continued to support her husband’s filmmaking.[6]

Nakahara died in her home on May 15, 2012. An apartment manager, at the request of her son, entered her home and found her collapsed in the bathroom. Doctors confirmed her death at the hospital[4] with the cause of death being heart failure.[6]